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 |   A journey of self-improvement - or not. |
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Sup? I'm Char. You may know me from timeless classics such as
and
I blog for things like
[Embed For Use By Upgraded+] Believin' all the lies that they're tellin' ya Buyin' all the products that they're sellin' ya They say jump and ya say "how high?" Ya braindead, ya got a fuckin' bullet in ya head |
Artist: Brand New Song: Gasoline [Embed For Use By Upgraded+] "JAFBG"  prompt: Well, that's easy to say. Tell us about something that sounds easy but you find incredibly difficult.Yeah, I had it all together for five minutes, I swear. I got a call at 6 in the morning like 10 days ago. My grandfather had fallen and was in the emergency room with major brain bleeding. I drove down to the hospital immediately and spent the next week at his bedside, holding his hand and talking to him. He was in a light coma, but would acknowledge me when I talked to him and could answer basic questions before falling back asleep. On the third day or so he developed pneumonia. On the final day they could keep his oxygen saturation up no matter what they did; they told us he wasn’t going to be able to pull through. My brother and I made the call to let him go so as not to prolong his suffering any further. It has been a very difficult time for me. Anyone here who has known me over the years knows that I viewed my grandparents more like parents as they were the stable adults in my life growing up and we lived next door to each other so I saw them many times per day and spent most of my time with them. When my grandmother passed in 2015, it was so shocking to us because she had no known health conditions. It was just completely sudden and out of the blue. I was so shocked I didn’t even really sit down and write about here until January of the following year: "Invalid Entry" This time around, I tried to do everything I possibly could do that I wasn’t able to do with my grandmother due to the shock. This time I wrote the obituary, designed the funeral program, built photo boards to have around the casket, called family members so my mom wouldn’t have to, etc. I’m still having an incredibly rough time with it. People keep telling me that we can’t live forever. I get that. Logically I know that people aren’t immortal. I know that my grandparents were obviously much older than me so this was inevitable at some point. It doesn’t help. For 7 of these 10 days, I wasn’t sleeping more than an hour at a time. I was sleeping maybe 2-3 hours a day. I wasn’t eating. One of the days my hands were just violently shaking and I thought I would pass out in the hospital. I mean, it’s as good a place as any if you’ve gotta do it. I was hallucinating here and there. Just small things, like hearing a distant conversation that wasn’t happening, seeing my cat from back home in my peripheral. I was taking loads of xanax to try to keep myself calm. So much, in fact, that I went through an entire month’s worth in a week. Every time I thought it was wearing off, I took more so that I wasn’t bringing a nervous energy to the situation and to stave off panic attacks. Now I’ve got an appointment tomorrow with a psychiatrist at my therapist’s office to try to explain why I need a refill 3 weeks early. In other words, having an overall difficult time. I know I don’t react well to these kinds of things. It’s the finality of it that bothers me. When my grandmother passed, my life got worse. Permanently. One less person in my support system, in my corner. One less person who I felt understood me. One less person I enjoyed knowing and felt comfortable spending time with. It’s the same with my grandfather. There aren’t many people or things that I hold dear to me, so life is just worse now forever. People tell me things like “oh it’ll get better with time” “ah, everyone loses their grandparents”. I disagree with the former; hard to disagree with the latter. But the former is just simply not true in my experience. Yes, the initial devastation improves- most likely you just get used to it. But it doesn’t really get better. My grandmother passed almost 8 years ago and it hasn’t gotten better. Every time something good or bad happens in my life, my first thought is that I can’t wait to tell her. My second is, oh wait, I can’t. Every family gathering, I’m thinking the whole time about how she isn’t there. Every time her birthday or the anniversary of her death comes around, the whole day I’m just thinking about her. Because my grandparents were the only people who consistently thought highly of me through all of my ups and downs. They were the only people who showed me patience and reassurance when others had given up on me. I wish it could be as easy as just waiting, giving things time. Maybe if my thoughts on death were different, I would grieve differently. So many people I know are comforted by the idea of an afterlife. Being with family who passed before you kind of thing. Because I don’t have that faith, I can’t lean on those thoughts for comfort. It’s one of the only times I actively wish I could be religious. It’s very bleak without it, but what can ya do. It’s not something you can fake. Anyway, my bereavement time was a couple days and that’s over so I’m back to working now, sitting in meetings all day like nothing’s happened. I’ll go back down to clean out his place later this week. I dunno. I did everything I could do. Now I’m just like, okay, obviously this has been a setback. I just don’t know how much of a setback yet. I swear it's like dying to catch a ghost It feels like I'm trying to hold smoke |
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